Working with Wordle

If you haven’t seen or played around with Wordle, you may want to check it out! It is a simple site in which you insert text into a box and  it creates a word cloud.

The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the text.

You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes.

You can print them out, or save them to the Wordle gallery to share with others.

I made a Wordle on the left with Martin Luther King’s I Have a Dream speech. I just copied the text and then played around with some layouts, fonts and colors. You can see the same speech portrayed in two different ways.

I have my students at the beginning of the year make Wordle’s on themselves so we can learn about them. You can have students create Wordle’s on a book review,characters in a book (the more important the characters are, the more frequently they put them into the text (so that they appear larger), review a historical document, or have them write their own speeches on a topic being studied and create a Wordle- the possibilities are endless!**

** Keep in mind that the Worlde gallery is not censored, and there may be inappropriate content found in the galleries. Hope this doesn’t hinder you using this in class!